Synecdoche, New York (2008) Review

If this movie is your favorite movie, then please let me know because I was with this movie for about 30 or 40 minutes and then it lost me and and by then end I was very uninterested in anything happening onscreen. The acting is all great. Philip Seymour Hoffman is amazing in everything and this movie is no exception. He plays Caden Cotard, a theater director who is struggling with his family and his grip on reality. He gets the McArthur grant and decides to use that great sum if money to make a play for the ages. He also wants this work to be figuratively and literally big. During the entirety of this production, his wife and daughter leave him and he starts to face am enormous amount of health problems that seem have no rhyme or reason for their relentlessness. By the time he is sitting at somebody's deathbed being forced to ask for forgiveness, you understand that the movie is just being absurd for the sake of being absurd.

Unfortunately, all these actors seem to think they are in a better movie than this. I am not sure who is a fan of movies where you never know if what you see onscreen is ACTUALLY happening. You quickly learn that this is one of those films and when all is said and done you still don't know if certain scenes happened. I don't have complaints about mindbending movies, but I will need some help and not random scenes where I just have to guess if it true or not. These scenes zap all of the credibility that the film had.

This is a Charlie Kaufman film. He wrote and directed it. This is the same guy who wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich. I didn't enjoy those movies, so I should have known better than to think this would be different. I will admit that I need to revisit Being John Malkovich to see if I still dislike it. This movie still stands as too jumbled to be cohesive. You see the giant play going on and it is so massive and so involved that you think something big will happen, but the film continues to spiral. If you enjoy Charlie Kaufman, then maybe this is for you. If you enjoy movies that aren't a mess and have a purpose then look elsewhere.